Modelling Mobile Marketing for Developers

The next big thing in marketing will be mobile marketing. Already this is showing signs of exponential growth: the current annual revenue for all forms of mobile marketing was around $3.3billion in 2011; by 2015 it is expected that this will have grown to over $20billion.
The basic mobile marketing model is in essence very similar to all forms of marketing. Advertisers need to discover the optimum advertising expenditure that produces the maximum net profit. This is very easy to do in hindsight: just plot actual expenditure and gross profit, and subtract the former from the latter after adjusting for seasonal and other variations. However, projecting this into the future is not so straight forward, especially in a rapidly changing marketplace with new players continually entering the scene and existing competitors perpetually adjusting their own strategies.
What makes mobile marketing very different from other forms of marketing is that it is very accessible. Before the internet came along, in order to offer a service to advertisers publishers needed to own television channels, radio stations or newspapers and magazines. Then came the internet and services such as Google’s AdSense became commonplace. These allowed anybody with a website to make (at least a little) money out of pay-per-click (PPC) marketing. With mobile marketing we are moving into an entirely different area. Although web developers are still able to profit from the rapid growth of mobile marketing, the big opportunity is monetising apps: iPhone app advertising and android advertising are the next big growth opportunities for developers.
This applies to individuals just as it does to small start up companies. Anyone who can come up with an idea for a great app and either can personally or as part of a team turn this into something that people want to download, has the potential of creating a lucrative business. Nothing much is needed in terms of up-front investment either. All a developer needs are the appropriate Android SDK or iOS SDK or other downloadable software development programs, most of which are available for free.

Of course you will need to monetise your apps and there are a number of ways of doing this. You can charge money for the privilege of downloading it; you can find a sponsor; you can use micropayments (for instance for additional game levels and add-ons); you can create free partial and paid-for full levels of your app; or you can embed banner adds using a mobile advertising network.

Mobile Marketing is the marketing model for the future. The time has never been as good as the present for jumping on this rapidly accelerating bandwagon.